Jerzy Stempowski, or how Poles should have bid Farewell to Ukraine

Janusz Korek

Jerzy Stempowski was one of the closest collaborators of Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of the Paris monthly Kultura, from the time of the journal’s inception, and had a serious influence on its political standpoint.[1] As an author publishing on its pages, he co-created the particular profile of the journal and his texts became a crucial component of Kultura’s“Eastern European” discourse. It’s worth reminding ourselves that for a long time he occupied fourth position in the list of Kultura’smost frequently published authors.[2] Commissioned by Giedroyc, he wrote various kinds of text—from essays and reportages, reviews and verdicts of literary awards, to commentaries on current political affairs. He signed himself not only with his own name, but also with pseudonyms: “The Unhurried Passerby” (“Nieśpieszny przechodzień”), Paweł Hostowiec or Leon Furatyk.

Book Review: “Internal Colonization. Russia’s Imperial Experience”

Madina Tlostanova

Alexander Etkind’s works are well known both to Russian readers and to Slavists in Europe and the US. In this present, ambitious and controversial project, Etkind attempts to enrich postcolonial theory with new concepts by introducing the Russian imperial experience into the postcolonial scope rather than simply applying postcolonial theoretical constructs to the analysis of the Russian context. The reader will know the purport of Etkind’s approach to the problem of the Russian empire from his previous publications [Etkind 2001, 2003].

A Theory’s Travelogue: Post-Colonial Theory in Post-Socialist Space

Radim Hladík

There are no translations available.

Few historical events have affected social theory as much as the end of the Cold War. Almost overnight, an entire tradition of thought grounded in Marxism-Leninism, the official paradigm in the social sciences and the humanities in the state-socialist bloc,disappeared. The legitimacy of Marxism of various strands around the globe also suffered. Even less politicized disciplines, from literature to economics, had to reevaluate their hitherto well-established concepts. The once politically supported and burgeoning Sovietology was converted from a political science into a historical discipline.

Western ‘Eurasianism’ and the ‘New Eastern Europe’: Discourse of Exclusion*

Mykola Riabchuk

The term ‘Eurasia’ has many meanings but all of them can be subsumed under two main rubrics. The first is purely geographical, referring to a formidable landmass stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and considering Europe and Asia as a single continental entity, with a former as a peninsula of the latter. The second meaning is much more versatile but in all its multi-facet representations it refers typically to a Greater Russia, to some space dominated historically by the Russian Empire and its Soviet (and post-Soviet) reincarnation.